John Nash, Nobel-Winning Mathematician Portrayed in ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ Dies in Crash
| John F. Nash Jr., a mathematician who shared a Nobel Prize in 1994 for work that greatly extended the reach and power of modern economic theory and whose decades-long descent into severe mental illness and eventual recovery were the subject of a 2001 film, “A Beautiful Mind,” was killed in a car crash Saturday in New Jersey. He was 86. |
| Mr. Nash, and his wife, Alicia, 82, were killed when the taxi they were riding in lost control and hit a guard rail and another vehicle, said Sgt. Gregory Williams of the New Jersey State Police. |
| Sergeant Williams said the taxi was traveling southbound on the New Jersey Turnpike when the driver lost control while attempting to pass another vehicle. Mr. and Mrs. Nash were ejected from the vehicle and pronounced dead at the scene. The taxi driver and the driver of the other car were treated for non-life threatening injuries. There are no criminal charges at this time. |
| Dr. Nash was widely regarded as one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century, known for the originality of his thinking and for his fearlessness in wrestling down problems so difficult few others dared tackle them. A one-sentence letter written in support of his application to Princeton’s doctoral program in math said simply, “This man is a genius.” |
| His theory of noncooperative games, published in 1950 and known as Nash equilibria, provided a conceptually simple but powerful mathematical tool for analyzing a wide range of competitive situations, from corporate rivalries to legislative decision making. Dr. Nash’s approach is now pervasive in economics and throughout the social sciences and is applied routinely in other fields, like evolutionary biology. |
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